Conference season is here! If your company is hosting an event or a booth, you've probably noticed that standing out in a crowded in-person environment is easier said than done.

Our customers are increasingly adopting Storylane to address this challenge; so we thought it might be helpful to share this quick checklist on how to attract, engage and convert conference goers with interactive demos.

Key takeaways

1. Set your in-booth demos on autoplay
2. Download your demos for offline use
3. Include forms to streamline lead gen
4. Use QR codes to improve accessibility
5. Service a broader audience with Demo Hub

Why use interactive demos at events, booths, and conferences?

There are several reasons why interactive demos work so well at in-person events.

• For one, they stand out from the usual product decks, brochures, and videos.
• More importantly, they let conference goers experience the product’s value on their own accord — with minimal sales intervention.
• Also, as compared to live demos, interactive demos provide a safe and flexible product environment for smooth, guided discovery.

5-point checklist for interactive demos at events, booths, and conferences

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1. Improve foot traffic with autoplay demos

Conference attendees don’t want another branded water bottle or pad of paper — they want to see innovative products like yours in action. Set your in-booth demos on autoplay to attract attention, improve foot traffic, and give attendees a relevant, hands-on product experience.

How it works: To set up Autoplay, toggle the Auto play demos option under the CONFIG menu of your demo settings.

2. Secure your product experience with offline demos

Remember that one time Steve Jobs ran into an unexpected internet issue during his keynote presentation for the iPhone? Well, if spotty Wi-Fi can affect the largest technology company in the world, there’s a good chance it can affect your product walkthroughs and presentations as well. 

Also, can we take a minute to talk about the Wi-Fi prices at these events and conferences? Especially given their unreliability, conference Wi-Fi can be absurdly expensive; as much as $2,000 per day! Yeesh!

This is where Storylane’s offline demos help. Offline demos support interactive demos even without an active internet connection. This is an effective way to avoid tedious ops works, awkward product crashes, and exorbitant Wi-Fi charges  — all in a single click.

How it works: Select “Download offline” to create a demo link. Once downloaded, you needn't worry about refreshing the page or losing progress during outages.

It’s also worth noting that Storylane doesn't require any additional software to work offline. These demos are built to run directly on your browser via a shareable URL — anytime, anywhere. 

3. Convert prospects on the spot with lead gen forms

Interactive demos can encourage attendees to convert on the spot during events and conferences. Prospects are usually happy to share their contact details in exchange for relevant product demos.

If your booth receives a lot of foot traffic, make sure to include a lead gen form in your demos. This is a good way to capture leads, even when your on-ground sales team is occupied with other prospects. Alternatively, offer to share a guided demo to high-intent prospects via email, LinkedIn, etc. to initiate  personalized nurturing efforts.

How it works: Head over to “Guide” on Storylane’s demo editor, add a step, select the screen of your choice, and pick “lead form” as your guide of choice. You can either use Storylane’s lead gen form or embed your own custom form. 

4. Empower better buyer enablement with QR codes

Furnish your booth, swag, presentations, and other marketing efforts with QR codes linked to interactive demos. This is a low-lift, non-invasive approach for prospects to take your product back home with them.

For one, this helps prospects review your product in their own time, rather than rushing through a demo at a busy booth. For another, this helps prospects share your demo with the rest of their team async.

How it works: Once you publish your demo, simply copy and enter the link into a QR code generator of your choice. Distribute this QR code across your marketing efforts to improve visibility and engagement.

5. Address multiple buyer personas and use-cases with Demo Hub

A single demo is rarely enough to convert multiple buyer personas. Accordingly, we recommend creating demo hubs as a centralized repository to address a range of audiences and use-cases simultaneously. Here’s a little more on how SentinelOne, a leading cyber security company, goes about this:

SentineOne created a demo-enabled “GeniusBar” kiosk at this year's RSA conference. This involved several iPads, displays, and on-ground sales reps showcasing Storylane demos to prospects while on the move. Since Storylane is device agnostic, prospects had a clean, true-to-life product experience.

How it works: Head over to "Demo Hub" in Storylane, and select "+ Create Hub" to get started. We typically recommend the Gallery layout for quick and snappy in-booth use-cases.

6. Bonus tips to make the most of your conference demos

Before signing off, here are a few short bonus tips to keep in mind when creating interactive demos for your next booths and conferences

• Build a narrative: Like the interactive demos that go on your website, your conference demos should tell a relevant story about the pain-points and use-cases that your product solves for. Tailor this narrative based on the nature of the conference and its attendees.
• Keep it short: Conferences are busy, jam packed affairs. Attendees are usually short on time, and even shorter on attention spans. Keep your demos concise and highlight only the most valuable, differentiated aspects of your product.
• Clean up the data: Needless to say, it’s important that your interactive demos reflect your product in the best possible light. Use the HTML editor to blur sensitive information and update the data and copy.
• Enable speakers: Using the real product during panel discussions or breakout sessions can be precarious, especially when you're presenting to a large, highly qualified audience. Storylane enables speakers with pre-curated demo flows, in-built presenter notes, and safe demo environments.

Storylane for Presales & Sales Engineers

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As a presales person or sales engineer, a large part of what you do involves developing a deep, technical understanding of customer needs and crafting demos that highlight how your product can address them. As you know, this is not without its challenges.

• For one, manually scaling personalized demo environments can be tedious and time consuming.
• For another, managing demo consistently and quality across multiple teams is often infeasible.
• With live product environments, there’s always a risk of unexpected crashes and data exposure.
• And finally, building demo environments from scratch tends to involve developer dependency.

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This is where demo automation comes in; to build code-free, personalized, and reliable demos at scale: 

• Code-free demo building - capture and customize the look and feel of your product, including scrolls, interactions, on-screen content, and guides with drag-and-drop demo building.
• Personalization at scale - tailor your demos based on prospect names, company names, geographies, currencies, and more in a matter of seconds with text and image tokens.
• Reliable environments - eliminate the risk of unexpected malfunctions or inadvertent sensitive data exposure in the live product environment with curated, pre-blurred demo environments

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And with that, here are 5 ways to use Storylane for Presales and Sales Engineers. 

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1. Pre-call demo

Buyers want to learn as much as they can about the product before they talk to Sales. In line with this preference, share a guided demo before the initial discovery call or RFP so prospects can have a taste of the product on their own.

• For one, this gives prospects hands-on context around your product. In turn, this reduces the time spent on discovery and makes room for deeper, technical discussions with presales.
• For another, analyzing demo engagement may reveal which features and use-cases the prospect cares about most. Again, this encourages high-intent conversations with sales and presales.

Example: Campminder shares a pre-call read-up to inbound leads, including a link to their guided demo

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“Once prospects see the guided product walkthrough, we skip over the discovery, and jump straight into a high-intent demo. Time saved for buyers and sellers. Skip over all the back and forth!”
- Melany Hallgren, Sales Manager, Campminder

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Key feature 

Guided demo -  A self-paced interactive demo involving a sequence of steps, hotspots, and annotations. The goal is to help prospects learn more about the product independently. Learn more.

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2. Live demos

Once qualified prospects experience your guided demo, they’ll want to learn more about the product over a live demo with Sales. For this, build, duplicate, edit, and personalize sandbox demos in a few clicks — without the worry of unexpected glitches or data exposure associated with live environments.

• Sandbox demos act as guardrails, eliminating the usual risks associated with live environments. This helps sales reps, SEs, and AEs give confident product walkthroughs during live demos.
• On-screen elements such as text, data, and media may be edited, blurred, or omitted to reflect your product in its best light. Also, as previously mentioned, these demos may be personalized by names, company, logos, currencies, dates, and more via dynamic demo tokens.

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Key feature 

Demo Tokens - Variable elements to personalize demos at scale (Similar to how personalized emails work). Storylane supports a range of token types including text, date, and images. Learn more.

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3. Use-case validation

One demo is rarely enough to close a deal. After a live demo, most prospects double down on research to better understand your product and its use-cases before committing to a purchase decision. Build use-case and persona specific Demo Hubs to help prospects better evaluate and validate your solution.

Example: SentinelOne’s Demo Hub validates multiple complex product features over bite-sized demos

Example: Dreamdata’s solutions page consists of multiple use-cases, each linking to a Storylane demo

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Key feature 

Demo Hub - A centralized collection of interactive demos, typically broken down by use-cases or buyer persona to help prospects evaluate and validate a wide range of product capabilities. Learn more.

4. Technical deep dives 

Towards the tail end of a purchase decision, it’s quite common for prospects to schedule multiple calls with presales and sales engineers for a deeper exploration into product capabilities and limitations. Storylane is your best friend when it comes to these technical product deep dives. 

• Build interactive demos for targeted scenarios based on customer requirements to demonstrate product value without the need for lengthy implementation or onboarding. 
• Prepare detailed, technical demos to review architecture, security compliance, integration capabilities and other product aspects that may be relevant to the wide buying committee. 

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Key feature

Presenter notes - In case of technical conversations, presenter notes help surface standard product specifications. They’ll also be helpful to bring new presales team members quickly up to speed.

5. Sales leave behinds 

Before we wrap up with our final use-case, it’s worth noting that this is not a non-exhaustive list. Rather, it’s a starting point for presales teams and sales engineers to build better demos, faster and with fewer resources. With that out of the way, sales leave behinds is a fifth way to use Storylane demos.

• Sharing an interactive demo based on the features and use-cases discussed after a live demo is a great way to help prospects and other stakeholders stay in touch with the product.
• Furthermore, enabling your “champion” with a personalized demo helps them achieve internal buy-in from the larger buying committee, which of course, translates to more deals for you :)

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Key feature

Gmail plugin - Storylane’s Gmail plugin helps insert demo GIFs and links into your emails, directly from Gmail. This is a great way to share leave behinds and follow up with prospects after a live demo. 

On average, only about 2% of website traffic converts.

As you might expect, a lot of effort goes into cranking this number up. I’m talking chatbots, exit pop-ups, gated resources, webinars, ROI calculators — the list goes on. At the end of the day, these lead magnets are issued with the objective of drawing in more sign-ups from your website.

Typically, this conversion funnel is pretty straightforward. Let’s say you deploy a chatbot on your website. For every 1,000 visitors that engage with this chatbot, maybe 20 submit their emails. Out of this 20, maybe 10 are sales qualified leads. And out of this 10, maybe 2 become paying customers. 

In such cases, it’s easy to (at least partially) attribute leads and pipeline back to the chatbot. A similar formula applies in the case of gated interactive demos: a set of visitors come across your gated demo, out of which a subset submit your lead gen form to gain access. From here, a smaller subset goes on to become customers. This is your pipeline from interactive demos. 

Simple? Sure. Recommended? Not so much.

Lead attribution for ungated interactive demos

At Storylane, we consistently discourage gating interactive demos. In our view, if people see your product in action and find value in it, they’re bound to sign-up on their own accord anyway. Gating a website resource merely adds to buying friction and discourages engagement. In fact, previous editions of The Plot verify that ungated demos receive more than 2x the engagement as their gated counterparts.

If anything, opening up relevant website resources such as interactive product demos act as a self-qualifying criteria that encourages fewer but far more relevant, high-quality conversions.

But how do you attribute these conversions back to your demos without a form or a gate? I’m excited to share Storylane’s novel approach to lead attribution for ungated interactive demos

A novel approach to lead attribution for interactive demos

Let’s take a quick example to highlight how lead attribution works on Storylane. Of course, the first step in this process entails integrating Storylane with your CRM. 

1. Let’s say an unknown visitor engages with an ungated interactive demo on your website. 

2. After an unspecified period of time, the same visitor returns to sign-up for, say, a free trial. Following their form submission, the visitor’s data is captured in your CRM as a lead.

3. At this point, Storylane will automatically identify this lead and tie them back to their engagement with your interactive demo, thereby attributing the conversion to the ungated interactive demo.

In other words, we’re flipping the script to retroactively attribute leads in your CRM to the ungated interactive demo they engaged with prior to their conversion. 

How does Storylane’s lead attribution work?

When you publish a demo on your website, Storylane automatically inserts a script (a tiny piece of code) onto the demo. Once the script is up and running (and Storylane is integrated to your CRM), we will automatically make sense of the users engaging with your demos and map them back to your CRM.

Demo engagement data from Storylane will be automatically populated within your CRM, allowing you to better understand the influence of your interactive demos on lead conversion. Learn more.